What isn’t Apple, audiobooks, or alcohol is probably cats.
Tools, tips, and observations covering Apple’s operating system Mac OS X.
“SpamSieve”:http://c-command.com/spamsieve/, by far “the best anti-spam email tool I’ve used”:/blog/410, was “updated to version 2.3”:http://mjtsai.com/blog/2005/04/25/spamsieve-23/ yesterday. The biggest change listed was increased accuracy, due to improvements in the tokenizers and parsers. John Gruber reported that the “beta versions were running at 99.9% accuracy”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2005/april#mon-25-spamsieve for him, which is several tenths of a percent above where I’d peaked.
When you get more than one thousand spams a week, you _live_ for a couple of tenths of a percent improvements. I of course upgraded immediately.
SpamSieve, by far the best anti-spam email tool I’ve used, was updated to version 2.3 yesterday. The biggest change listed was increased accuracy, due to improvements in the tokenizers and parsers. John Gruber reported that the beta versions were running at 99.9% accuracy for him, which is several tenths of a percent above where I’d peaked.
When you get more than one thousand spams a week, you live for improvements of a couple of tenths of a percent. I of course upgraded immediately.
I purchased “Saft”:http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft/, a plug-in for the Safari web browser on Mac OS X, a while back, after using the demo version for a couple days. I’ve found a number of features well worth the $12 purchase price. The latest release adds yet another terrific feature.
I purchased Saft, a plug-in for the Safari web browser on Mac OS X, a while back, after using the demo version for a couple days. The two features I used immediately and loved were:
There’s been a lot of press recently about Apple’s lawsuit against the Think Secret website, and virtually all of them assert that Think Secret has a First Amendment right to publish as they have been doing. Finally, someone has written — and done the research to back it up — what I had been thinking for a while: that “it’s not unreasonable for Apple to sue people who publish their trade secrets”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/03/new_york_times.
There’s been a lot of press recently about Apple’s lawsuit against the Think Secret website, and virtually all of them assert that Think Secret has a First Amendment right to publish as they have been doing. Finally, someone has written — and done the research to back it up — what I had been thinking for a while: that it’s not unreasonable for Apple to sue people who publish their trade secrets.
It’s one thing to suppress protected speech; if Apple was suing to make the guy stop writing about how much he hates Steve’s black turtlenecks, or something else that was a matter of opinion or public fact, that would be one thing. But Think Secret is publishing commercial trade secrets, or at least trying to, and that runs into other laws besides the First Amendment.
Now, the court may eventually find in favor of Think Secret. And that would be OK. But it’s a complicated issue that deserves debate and deliberation, and the courts are the right place for that. So I’m not at all feeling like Apple is out of line for initiating the lawsuit.
I was recently trying to configure automatic backups for a friend’s computer, the idea being that once a week his important files would be backed up to his .Mac account. The problem is, the backups just keep taking up more and more space on his .Mac account. Eventually it fills up. And Backup stops working.
I was recently trying to configure automatic backups for a friend’s computer, the idea being that once a week his important files would be backed up to his .Mac account. Having remote backup is one of the reasons he is paying for a .Mac membership. It’s not an ideal or comprehensive backup solution, but definitely a good thing.
But, the whole point is it’s supposed to be automatic, transparent, set and forget, don’t think about it until the time comes when you have to restore. The problem is, the backups just keep taking up more and more space on his .Mac account. Eventually it fills up. And Backup stops working.
2004 was a big year for spam, after “Congress voted to make it legal”:http://www.spamhaus.org/position/CAN-SPAM_Act_2003.html at the end of 2003. The result: “spam increased sharply in 2004”:http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/business/can-spam-act-40216.html. But in my own, more personal battles with spam I’ve been more successful at holding back the tide.
2004 was a big year for spam, after Congress voted to make it legal at the end of 2003. The result: spam increased sharply in 2004.
But in my own, more personal battles with spam I’ve been more successful at holding back the tide. My stats for 2004:
36278 Good Messages
72239 Spam Messages (67%)
197 Spam Messages Per Day
135 False Positives
451 False Negatives (77%)
99.5% Correct
Nearly seventy five thousand spam messages came at me, but thanks to SpamSieve a mere 451 made it into my Inbox. That’s less than two spams a day. Simply amazing.
In The Mac mini: Comparing Apples and Oranges, Dan Frakes breaks down the pricing for Apple’s low-cost system and a “comparable” $399 Dell system that journalists all over the planet seem to think is a fair comparison. Unlike all those other journalists, he actually compares _everything_ that comes in the box or pre-installed on the hard drive.
In The Mac mini: Comparing Apples and Oranges, Dan Frakes breaks down the pricing for Apple’s low-cost system and a “comparable” $399 Dell system that journalists all over the planet seem to think is a fair comparison. Unlike all those other journalists, he actually compares everything that comes in the box or pre-installed on the hard drive.
The nutshell is, the Dell is missing a lot. If you need any of those things (and some of them, such as anti-virus software, are essential to everyone running Windows), the Dell stops being so cheap.
Like a lot of other Mac aficionados, I followed yesterday’s announcements by Apple quite closely. A lot of people are writing about them, so I’m just going to jot down a couple of thoughts I’ve had that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
Like a lot of other Mac aficionados, I followed yesterday’s announcements by Apple quite closely. A lot of people are writing about them, so I’m just going to jot down a couple of thoughts I’ve had that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
But first: I think the Mac mini is a grand-slam; I expect Apple to sell a million units a quarter through the rest of this year (assuming they can make that many), with only a modest impact (cannibalization) of sales of existing products. Most of these will be to first-time Mac owners. The price point and the packaging are both trying to suggest that the Mac mini is an impulse buy (even if the idea of switching platforms on an impulse is ridiculous).
In the three or four years I’ve been fighting unwanted e-mail messages with better tools than the Delete key I’ve tried almost a dozen different tools. This is a quick survey of the ones I’ve used, and why I don’t (or do) still use them.
In the three or four years I’ve been fighting unwanted e-mail messages with better tools than the Delete key I’ve tried almost a dozen different tools. This is a quick (ha!) survey of the ones I’ve used, and why I don’t (or do) still use them.
My very first anti-spam tool was something called Mailfilter. I used it for my personal e-mail on Mac OS X, wrote about it here, and almost immediately afterwards lost a non-spam message to an aggressive keyword match. That was the end of Mailfilter. I can’t even remotely recommend it, as it’s just not intelligent enough (strict, single expression matching), and had zero safety net.
My next attempt at a solution was a utility called SpamFire. Like Mailfilter, it is a “pre-filter,” which means it would run before my e-mail client, download my mail, and skim out the spam. Unlike Mailfilter, it actually saved the trapped messages, so if it made a mistake, I could recover the message. It had plenty of other differences from Mailfilter, which I wrote about previously, and which made it so useful that it became the first anti-spam tool I paid for. But in the end I switched to a different tool because SpamFire was separate from my e-mail client, and that made it cumbersome to use.
I was introduced a couple months ago to the work of productivity guru David Allen, finding a glowing review and an overview of his organization system on the 43 Folders weblog. But buying the book has had unintended consequences.
I was introduced a couple months ago to the work of productivity guru David Allen, finding a glowing review of his latest book and an overview of his organization system on a weblog, 43 Folders, which has also been doing a nice job explaining how to implement Allen’s system using software available for Mac OS X. I investigated further, and was impressed by what I learned. The system seemed both sophisticated and simple — an extremely rare combination.
More importantly, aspects resonated with me; it both explained what was missing from my current approach to being “organized”, and made me believe the system could work for me. I immediately bought the book from Amazon.com, and when it arrived placed it in pole position on my night-stand for immediate reading.
Can you see where this is going?
So far the only thing Getting Things Done has helped me do is fall asleep. I pick it up diligently each time I get into bed, begin reading…and pass out after a couple of pages. I cannot read the book for more than 20 minutes at a stretch — at least, not while sitting in bed.
I’m still a believer in GTD. Indeed, the first third of the book has convinced me that it can work for me, improving my efficiency and stress levels. I plan to give the book a better go in the New Year. Setting up our reading chair with a good light and a warming blanket is the current action on that particular project.
On second thought, maybe the blanket isn’t such a good idea…
I wrote before about “downgrading” to a slower hard disk, just because it made less noise than the fast disk it replaced. I also spent a lot of time researching parts and putting together two PCs from nearly silent components, just to replace my old server and Rochelle’s aging — and incredibly noisy — PC.
After doing all of that, the noisiest item in the office was once again my Mac, which lost the title when I took out the noisy hard disk, but had a couple of fans that were quite a bit louder than the now-very-quiet fans in the two PCs.
I wrote before about “downgrading” to a slower hard disk, just because it made less noise than the fast disk it replaced. I also spent a lot of time researching parts and putting together two PCs from nearly silent components, just to replace my old server and Rochelle’s aging — and incredibly noisy — PC.
After doing all of that, the noisiest item in the office was once again my Mac, which lost the title when I took out the noisy hard disk, but had a couple of fans that were quite a bit louder than the now-very-quiet fans in the two PCs.
When I got my new girlfriend, that noise went away. My PowerBook is normally completely silent, because laptops run cooler than desktops and the aluminum case dissipates heat extremely well. There is a fan, and it makes noise when it’s on, but that’s only when the CPU is really crunching. Now, although they are pretty quiet, the server and Rochelle’s PC are again the noisy items in the office.
It’s really not a lot of noise. A quiet radio or a conversation would cover it, as does the street noise most of the time. But, it’s still there, and since I’m most efficient at night, when everything else gets quiet, it’s starting to be annoying. Which is crazy, because 6 months ago the reduced noise level from those systems made me ecstatic.
I’ve realized that I’m becoming a crank, someone obsessed with something most people find trivial, and I’m sure I will ultimately go mad trying to squeeze that last decibel or two out of the office. My only consolation is that I am not alone, and it’s now possible to find plenty of components, and even whole systems, that make computing quiet.
Some of the most useful utilities I’ve found for my system are available as tiny “menu extras.” These little widgets, almost always compact icons, sit on the right side of the menu bar. Here’s my current Mac OS X right-side menu bar, and details on why I like each utility.
Some of the most useful utilities I’ve found for my system are available as tiny “menu extras.” These little widgets, almost always compact icons, sit on the right side of the menu bar. Sometimes the icon itself is useful, sometimes it’s just a symbol. Sometimes the item’s menu is where all the action is, sometimes you use it in other ways.
After buying it at Macworld Expo last year, I used You Control for about 6 months as my only right-side menu bar utility, using it to put everything I wanted in the menu bar. My theory was that with only one utility providing all the items, it would take less memory and processor time, and be a little more stable. But in the end I found that the You Control versions of various menu widgets simply were not as good as the independent options I’d found, and I switched to the stand-alone versions I’m using today.
Here’s my current Mac OS X right-side menu bar. From left to right, I have QuickSilver, WeatherPop Advance, Timbuktu, Desktop Manager, Shh, MenuCalendarClock, the Mac OS X menu bar clock, Script Menu, iSync menu extra, Internet Connect VPN menu extra, AirPort menu extra, and the battery menu extra.
Some of these have been written about by others, among them QuickSilver and MenuCalendarClock, so I thought I’d just explain why I like a couple of my choices.
Although I didn’t intend for this post to bash You Software, whose products I like, they just released a public beta version of a virtual desktops utility which competes with one of my favorite items. I tried You Control: Desktops, and will be sticking with Desktop Manager, primarily because YC:D doesn’t allow you to assign keyboard shortcuts to individual desktops, so there’s no way from the keyboard to go directly to your desired desktop. You can choose a desktop from a list, but that’s potentially 4 keystrokes, not just one. Desktop Manager is also free, while YC:D will cost money.
Another unusual item in my menu bar is Shh. I like this tool a lot, because it’s incredibly flexible. Basically, it runs shell commands (the commands you can type at the command line) and puts the results in a menu bar. A great example is finding out what your IP address is (if yours changes); there are a bunch of utilities dedicated to doing just that, but why not use a more general tool that can do that, and a hundred other things — limited only by your expertise at the command line? (I’ll explain my own Shh commands in a future post.)
A last thing I love about these cool little tools is that they are not expensive. QuickSilver (possibly the most useful utility on my system) is free, as is Desktop Manager, and all of the items built into Mac OS X 10.3 (“Panther”). Shh is $5 and WeatherPop Advance is $8. MenuCalendarClock is free for the basic features, and $18.95 to unlock all features (which are totally worth it). Of all the widgets here, only Timbuktu cost more than $20, and I only have that for my consulting, for which it’s necessary — and so tax-deductible.
I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my test system long enough. LTFP.
“LTFP” was an acronym we used at Cymerc, the dot.bomb I worked at for 14 months before it imploded. We started using the term a couple weeks before we released the first version of our public web site. It stood for Launch This Fucking Pig, which basically meant we thought it sucked but were tired of testing, and just wanted it out the door.
LTFP is what I did very early this morning.
I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my Mac OS X system, setting it up, configuring it to use the same URL scheme as my old weblog system, tweaking the template a bit, and — most importantly — importing all my old weblog posts from the old system. After four weeks of dithering and obsessing, it’s not done, but it’s going live anyway.
I’ve tried to not break any permalinks to pre-existing posts or the syndication feeds, and otherwise keep it compatible with the bookmarks that people may have for this site. But I’m sure there will be a few things to fix. Leave me a comment if you find something.
There’s also plenty to do on cleanup. I will probably have to edit every single post to clean up the HTML and re-link the URLs I included in old posts. And I’m not terribly happy with the design of this template, which is pretty basic, and virtually unchanged from the generic version of Kubrick, which I used to get started. It’s a great template, but there are well-understood steps I still need to take to make it my own…
Anyway, by switching to WordPress, a much more popular weblogging system, I should be back to posting regularly, as the system will get in my way a lot less.